


Rachel Duncan Lesbian Indulgence™

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, also one of them is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-12 16:28:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19232818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: People keep asking for post-canon fics where Rachel is a lesbian. This is a collection of all of them.





	1. Unnamed (NSFW)

**Author's Note:**

> Look...I'm gay...just let me have this one

She won’t stop complimenting Rachel on her apartment. The woman, that is. The woman won’t stop complimenting Rachel on her apartment, and Rachel has poured herself wine, and Rachel is standing and looking at the view of the Alps in the distance and she is bone-deep exhausted.

She’s nice looking. The woman, that is. She doesn’t look like anybody Rachel has ever known. She doesn’t have any of the two hundred and seventy-four names that Rachel cannot touch. She has a nice smile. Rachel saw that, at the bar. She has a nice smile.

When the woman turns away from the view Rachel puts her glass down, presses her hand to the woman’s chin, and kisses her.

This entire process exhausts her. She is exhausted and she wants to weep and she wants this to be done, all of this, but at the same time something small and curious and sick is curling all through her and she finds that she is still kissing this woman whose name isn’t any of those two hundred and seventy-four names. Rachel can only taste the wine. Their mouths are both so soft. It’s never felt like this before, really, this soft. She bites experimentally at the curve of that soft lip and the woman sighs, and that’s still soft. All so soft.

Rachel can feel her pulse beating, frantic, in her throat. If this was a man she would coax his hand there and choke that pulse right out. But this isn’t a man, it’s a woman. The woman. The woman in Rachel’s apartment, back turned to the sky.

“Bed,” Rachel breathes against her mouth. They move towards the bedroom. Hands on Rachel’s hips. If this was a man – but this isn’t a man, there are hands on Rachel’s  _hips_  this isn’t a man, is it. Do the hands feel good? She asks herself if the hands feel good. She can’t decide. She wishes this woman was dead. She wishes Ferdinand was here to make this woman dead. God, she doesn’t wish that, she doesn’t know what she wants. Her hips hit her bed and she’s sitting on her bed and there is a weight in her lap and that weight is the woman. Rachel strokes her hands up the curve of hip and waist and ribs. She sighs, shaky, against soft lips.

“I’ve never,” she says, and then stops talking, and then bites. Blood. God, she’s ruining this. Somehow she is ruining this, only: hands sliding under her top, warm palms on her skin. Fingers tracing the bottom of Rachel’s bra, searching and shy.

“You’ve never?” says the woman.

“Not in this bed,” Rachel says. Which is true. Not in  _any_  bed, really, she’d never let them touch her in her bed. Because it’s hers. She’s on her back. Mouth on her neck, the scrape of teeth, Rachel goes  _oh_  and it sounds so small. She closes her eyes tight shut. 

“Can I–” whispers a voice against her jugular. God, she must be able to feel Rachel’s heart. God, she must be able to feel Rachel’s fear all the way down.

“No,” Rachel says, and the woman hums  _mm_  and keeps kissing down. Collarbones. They get Rachel out of her shirt, and it’s clumsy, and Rachel is hiccuping laughter at it: the idea of being  _clumsy_. She’s never been clumsy before. She’s never done this before. She’s never. Hot wet mouth on the skin between her breasts. Rachel reaches her awful clumsy hands up and slides them under the woman’s shirt, up the curve of her back, scratches fingernails down. Woman goes  _oh_. 

_I know I’m ruining it_ , Rachel wants to say. Patient, explaining.  _I know that I am doing this all wrong. It’s only that I’m used to men, and breaking them_ , but this woman doesn’t even care about that. Any of it. She is on her knees and she is unbuttoning Rachel’s pants and Rachel can feel her breath against the skin of her stomach and Rachel has her hand over her mouth and her eyes are still shut. If she keeps her eyes shut, none of this has to be real.

“I’m gonna take care of you,” whispers a breath against the place between her legs. Rachel shudders out a high thin sound and closes her eyes and clenches her other hand into the bedspread and then – oh – oh. She opens her eyes and her vision is blurred and wet and she closes her eyes again. Oh. So that’s it. She steps outside of her body for a moment and watches herself: the bucking of her hips, the hot salt water streaming down her face.  _Are you enjoying it?_ she asks the woman on the bed, the woman on her back on the bed all one-eyed and shuddering.  _Do you like this? Does it feel good?_

“Oh,” Rachel says, her clumsy words and her clumsy mouth and her clumsy hands. Oh. Her desperate animal hips keep thrusting forward over and over again, like her body – for once – understands her own wants better than her.  _Oh_ , says Rachel, and Rachel’s awful body says  _yes_. It keeps on saying  _yes_  and Rachel can’t decide whether or not that’s what she wants it to say. She keeps her eyes closed and lets it make her decisions. She lets the warmth hold her, rushing through every bit of her veins.

Orgasm hits her only it doesn’t hit her, it does something else, it doesn’t hit her. She opens her eyes and the sound goes on and on and on. Then it’s done, and she drops back down to the bed. She can hear her own breathing, jagged. Rachel remembers, again, that this is not a man – she can’t tell him to leave so she can be alone. She wipes her hand hastily over her face so the water there can’t damn her. She feels her heart circle anxiously around her chest and then resume its usual beating.

Her hands are tugging the woman back, and Rachel is sitting up, and they’re kissing again. She can taste herself in this woman’s mouth and it’s awful and it’s dirty and that curious thing inside of her has grown flowers and they’re all blooming. Rachel shudders, and feels them blooming.

“You okay?” whispers the woman, touching Rachel’s neck and shoulders and spine. 

“Yes,” Rachel breathes, and pulls her back again.


	2. Anna

Her name is Anna. She has black hair. Rachel is almost to the point, now, where she can touch her and not be terrified of it.

If it was sex that would be embarrassing enough, but it’s other touches – public touches, the brush of fingertips against back or the times Anna has reached for her hand to hold it.  _You can’t_ , Rachel keeps wanting to say.  _Think of the cameras. Think of my reports. They’ll all be biased. Cosima is already a lesbian, there can’t be two–_

And then she thinks  _God_  but it’s too late, by then. It’s always too late. Anna stops reaching for her hand, and Rachel is not the sort of animal that could ever reach when she wants to reach. She still – after all this time – does not know how to be that animal. They sit at dinner, they make polite warm conversation about their days. Rachel watches the curve of Anna’s knucklebones on the table and wants to touch them, and she does not touch them.

She hasn’t ever spent this much time with a woman before. At DYAD she was either at business meetings or with monitors, and the amount of women in either group was slim to none. After DYAD – she was alone. She gloried in it, being alone. Now she has stopped glorying in it, but the muscles have atrophied; she doesn’t know what to say. Especially not to women. Say  _get on your knees_ to a woman and it has an entirely separate connotation.

The conversation is new in a way that is disconcerting. Spending this much time with another woman is also new, also disconcerting. It hurts.

 

She thinks she likes it.

 

Rachel’s apartment is small, which means a few candles and the company of another person makes it feel – strangely, in a way that is too close to fear – like it could be a home. The windows have curtains; sometimes Rachel closes them. It’s just the two of them alone in the dark. In the dark it could be anyone’s hands. Her hands could be Cosima’s hands. Anna’s hands could be anyone’s hands touching anyone’s body and in the dark Rachel can feel all sorts of things that she doesn’t ever have to confess to. As long as her face is blank by the time one of them turns the lamp on, nothing she does has to mean anything.

They walk through the streets, through the lightly falling snow. Anna talks about her childhood. Rachel talks about an approximation of her childhood, the parents who had her raised by a coworker and came back into her life years later – both of them dead now – and the surrogate father who used her for her inheritance. She says  _I’m an only child_  and it feels like flying. Her hands, tucked in her pockets, imagine being brave.

She has never been brave. Bravery is the work of people like Sarah Manning, who spat  _bi_  when her intake report at DYAD asked her sexuality. Rachel is terrified, and angry, and in the right light sometimes these things can look like bravery. Mostly they aren’t. She is angry at Anna for not reaching over and taking Rachel’s hand, and she is terrified that Anna will, and neither of these things are particularly brave.

When Rachel exhales, her breath plumes out silver. She looks over and Anna is watching her, fond.

“Sorry,” she says, ducking her head back down. “I like looking at you.”

 _They all do_  curls around Rachel’s tongue, burning and sharp.  _They all did_  follows it like smoke.

“The feeling is mutual,” she says instead, and Anna looks back at her and smiles. If they kiss on this corner Rachel will hate Anna forever. If they don’t kiss, she’ll hate her too. She hates being herself. She wishes she was anyone else. Sarah Manning would have pinned this girl up against a wall and bit her neck and been honest, said things like  _I want to touch you with the lights on and I’m mad with it_. But Rachel isn’t Sarah. Some days this is a relief.

They stop on the corner. Snow has settled in Anna’s hair and it’s melting and she’s beautiful. She is so beautiful, and – Rachel could touch her. She could, if she could tell her hands that they don’t have to be scared of it.

Anna puts her hand to Rachel’s face and kisses her. Rachel kisses back; hate rises in her chest like a shipwreck surfacing through dark water. She shudders with it, feels it roll through her, puts her gloved hand on Anna’s arm. Through the layers of fabric of her glove and Anna’s coat it’s like neither of them are real people. Well. Rachel isn’t a real person, but with her eyes closed – kissing Anna – she can pretend that Anna isn’t real too.

They stop kissing. Snow in Anna’s eyelashes. The hate is hot and sick in Rachel’s chest, and then Rachel realizes that it might be love, and then Rachel realizes that she thinks she wants to cry. She drops her hand.

Anna smiles at her. Rachel tries to make her mouth into something that can smile back. They keep walking, that space between them where neither of them are reaching for each other’s hands.


	3. Sophia

She wakes up and the dream wasn’t real. Just another dream, Rachel’s heart throwing itself against the cage of her ribs like it could turn into birds and fly away from her. She flattens her palm to skin-under-silk and feels her heart rate settle, slowly. Dawn light like water trickling through the cracks in the curtains. Sophia asleep in the bed, blonde hair tangled up in the sheets: not a monitor. Rachel sits up and puts her feet on the floor. A minute or so later, she stands.

Her robe is hanging on the hook where she left it; Rachel pulls it around herself as she pads out into the living room of their apartment. The dream skitters around the edges of her mind, clawed and curious. Someone was trying to hurt her, and she had to stop them – she had to convince them not to hurt her – but she couldn’t speak. She doesn’t remember if it’s because her tongue wasn’t working or because someone was pressing on her throat, but. She couldn’t speak.

Water, kettle, the clicking as the stove turns on. Rachel takes a chair at the kitchen table and folds her hands on the wooden surface, leans her elbows on the edge. She’ll do something with her hands today to remind herself she still has hands. Maybe she’ll make something with the last of the leeks. Maybe she’ll paint the light, or Sophia in the light.

The sun rises outside and slowly fills up the room. Their room. The room that belongs to the person that Rachel is, now. No paintings of swans – no scientific texts – no VHS player – one book of Greek mythology, but it’s Sophia’s. The first few months it was an impossible struggle to not give herself one anchor; Rachel wanted a wall made entirely of windows, Rachel wanted white marble and uncomfortable chairs. She allowed herself none of it. The windows have curtains and the chairs are soft enough to curl up in. After a while, Sophia stopped trying to hold her during the panic attacks; a while after that, the panic attacks stopped entirely.

The kettle whispers to itself. Rachel pours herself tea and sits back down at the table, facing the door. She has to face the door. If she doesn’t face the door someone could come through it and god, idiot, of course no one is going to come through it, there is no one left to come through it because Rachel killed him and if she’d just loved him the right way then he wouldn’t have had to–

“Rachel,” says a voice that isn’t Rachel’s, and it’s Sophia’s, and Rachel is here, and there are no men in this apartment, and it’s only when she lets go of her mug that she realizes it was boiling the skin of her palms.

“I woke you,” she rasps. “Apologies.”

“Bad dreams?” Sophia drops herself into the other chair at the table, begins contemplatively tracing the grains. She is so unbelievably lovely – as in Rachel can’t believe in her. Someday she’ll realize what Rachel is and then she’ll leave. Rachel keeps lying to her to try and put that day off, but Sophia probably sees through it. The lying. Rachel is sure that she knows.

“I’m sorry I woke you,” Rachel says. The tea scalds when it goes down and she drinks it anyways. Ouch.

Sophia looks at her. In the light her eyes are a shade between blue and green. Rachel watches the fall of hair over her shoulder, the long thin slope of her nose, the red nail polish on her fingernails. Rachel drinks more tea. Her heart remembers again that it is not birds.

“How can I help you?” Sophia says.

“You are,” Rachel says. “Helping.” She puts down the mug and watches her palms become a color that isn’t red. “I’m sorry. I wish for your sake that I was better.”

“You don’t need to be better,” Sophia says. She reaches across the table and lightly touches her fingertips to Rachel’s knuckles – waits – wraps her hand around Rachel’s hand. It’s warm and it doesn’t burn Rachel at all. “I love you, okay? You don’t need to be better.”

Sophia says this to Rachel sometimes; eventually Rachel will start believing in it. For now she wraps her hand around Sophia’s hand and holds it. The way that Sophia’s tank top is hanging off her neck bares her collarbones, the shadow curve of one breast, a flat cream line of skin. Rachel feels desire and isn’t ashamed of it, the way it unfolds all through her.

She raises their joined hands to her mouth and presses her mouth to Sophia’s knuckles. Their hands go back to the table. There are no clocks ticking; they are in a slow place where there is no time.

“Look at the light,” she says, watching it slowly move its way across the floorboards.

“Are you going to paint it?” Sophia says, and Rachel says “Yes.”


	4. Gillian, Amanda, etc. (pre-canon)

“Dare,” says Gillian Evans. She blushes, twists the hem of her skirt in wringing hands. Gillian is terrible at literature and worse at maths; her parents are divorced; she won’t eat mushrooms. That’s all Rachel knows about her. She still isn’t used to seeing girls with unfamiliar faces and not knowing anything about them. It’s horrifying. She doesn’t twist her own skirt, but it’s close.

“I dare you…” muses Sylvia Greengrass. Her quicksilver eyes dart over the entire circle of girls tucked away in the empty backroom. In candlelight her eyes look silver; they’re not, they’re blue.

“…to kiss a girl,” Sylvia finishes.

The circle giggles. Rachel doesn’t giggle. Is she supposed to giggle? She’s starting to get the suspicion that DYAD sent her to boarding school because they realized, too late, that she should perhaps be a person. If girls giggle at the concept of kissing other girls, she should giggle. But 324B21–

“Nooo,” whines Gillian. She’s blushing, shaking her head back and forth. She has red hair, and a pudgy face, and freckles. The Leda subjects have none of those things.

“You have to,” says Sylvia. “That’s the  _rules_.”

“I’ll do it,” says Rachel. “If it means we’ll keep playing.” They’re supposed to keep playing. Girls play Truth or Dare, she’s learned this, so they should keep playing. Rachel hasn’t kissed anyone before – but it doesn’t seem very difficult. It’ll be fine.

The circle of girls choruses  _ooooooh_ , breathily.

“Are you a  _lesbian_ , Rachel?” says Martha Thompson.

“Of course not,” Rachel says. “If anything Sylvia’s the lesbian. She said we had to kiss, didn’t she?”

 _Oooooh_ , says the circle again. Sylvia looks furious. “Just  _do_  it,” she says.

Gillian looks at Rachel. She looks like she’s about to cry. “Honestly,” Rachel mutters. She stands up, smoothes her skirt down, crosses the circle and kneels in front of Gillian.

“I don’t–” Gillian starts, and then Rachel kisses her.

It’s fine. Rachel knew it would be fine. Gillian’s mouth is soft and tastes faintly of toothpaste, and she presses her mouth gamely to Rachel’s in a way that makes Rachel’s lips spark. Rachel could tangle her fingers in Gillian’s crinkly red hair; she didn’t realize that before, but she could. She could touch the soft skin of Gillian’s stomach, or maybe fold Gillian’s fingers in hers–

She breaks the kiss, leans back. Her heart is thumping madly against her ribs – but DYAD taught her many things, and the flatness of her face is one of them. “There,” she says, without any particular inflection. “It’s your turn now, Gillian.”

“Oh,” says Gillian, reaching up and absentmindedly wiping off her lips with the back of her wrist. “Um, Clara. Truth or dare?”

Rachel goes back across the circle. She takes her seat. Some of the girls are staring at her, but mostly they’re all bored – the deed is done. They kissed. It’s over.

The kiss flickers like a small sticky little flame, pulsing up into her throat. She hadn’t known that kissing would feel good. Rachel presses her tongue to the seam of her lips and tastes someone else’s toothpaste; her heart beats itself to death, giddy and mad.

* * *

It’s not that they don’t kiss boys. They do kiss boys. There’s a boys’ school down the road, and sometimes the girls and boys do their terrible stilted dances together.  _Sometimes_  boys take girls away from the dances, and then they kiss. And they do all sorts of other things. Apparently. 

Girls keep gossiping to Rachel about this, although Rachel has decided by now that she doesn’t particularly want to befriend any of them or hear any of their gossip. For some reason, this makes them all more desperate to be her friend – like her indifference is a shield one of them can pierce and shatter, like she is a victory that they can win. Sylvia Greengrass offers to braid Rachel’s hair for the next dance; Minnie Scott begs to borrow one of Rachel’s dresses. They hover around her like flies.

Even at the dance.

The boys aren’t anything particularly noteworthy – they’re small and awkward and too well-scrubbed, sweaty, whispering to each other and staring at the girls like terrified deer. Rachel’s girls aren’t any better; every time a boy looks in their direction, they giggle. It’s ridiculous. Eventually Rachel gives up, crosses the empty dance floor, finds the least nervous-looking boy and says: “Dance with me.”

The boys grin at each other: nervous flashes of white teeth.

“Alright,” says the boy. He takes her hand. They go. They dance. He steps on her foot. Rachel makes small talk about his siblings (two sisters) and his pet (a dog named Spot) and his academic interests (“Uh…lunch?”) until the song ends. Then he wipes his hands on his pants and says “Where’s, uh, the bathroom?”

“Outside,” Rachel says. “Down the hallway, to the left.”

“Can you show me?”

Oh.

Rachel turns on her heel and leaves their school’s gymnasium, the sad wilted strains of the music and the awkward fumblings of the children her age. Behind her the door opens and shuts again as the boy follows.

“You walk fast,” he says, jogging to catch up.

Rachel doesn’t say anything. When they get far enough away she grabs the front of his shirt, pins him to the wall, and kisses him.

It feels like absolutely nothing. It feels like two sisters and a dog named Spot. He tries to shove his tongue into her mouth and she leans back – frowns – he spins them and pins her to the wall. His mouth is back on her mouth. God, he kisses like a sad wet slap. Rachel bears it until his hand starts fumbling at the front of her dress, and then she manages to get free. “No,” she says.

“No?” says the boy.

“I’m sure you can find the bathroom on your own,” Rachel says, and goes back inside.

* * *

Later, when she’s falling asleep, she imagines that it was Gillian. Which is a strange thing to imagine. But not very strange: Gillian was Rachel’s first kiss. She imagines Gillian, in her sad pink puff of a dress, nervously asking Rachel where the bathroom is – the way she’d trip after Rachel hastily, how soft she’d go when Rachel pinned her to the wall. The sound she’d make. The sweet toothpaste shape of her mouth.

Rachel’s body turns into sparks and shivering. Her eyes open up wide in the dark; she slips her knuckles into her mouth, bites down hard and holds her bones between her teeth.

* * *

“Clara says that Lily says that her brother told her that you  _kissed_  Samuel,” says Amanda Hughes in a giddy rush of breath. All the other girls near Rachel go silent at their breakfast, spoons hovering above grayish bowls of oatmeal. 

“Yes,” Rachel says. She eats another spoonful. The girls around her crowd closer.

“Was he amazing?” breathes Martha, eyes very wide.

“No,” Rachel says. “He was too sloppy. He obviously hadn’t practiced.” She finds the lump of a blueberry in the oatmeal, eats that.

“We’re supposed to practice?” whispers Amanda.

“Samuel didn’t,” says Sylvia, meanly. The girls snicker. They fall into whispering and gossiping and other drivel, and Rachel finishes off her oatmeal and leaves for French class. She doesn’t think anything else of it. It happened – it was unmemorable – they’ll all forget about it.

They don’t.

Or at least Amanda doesn’t.

Amanda grabs Rachel’s hand and pulls her aside after classes, past the lined rows of trees and the green grass lawns, off to a tucked-away corner of the school where no one is likely to find them.

“Rachel will you help me please,” she blurts. Her eyes are very blue, and very wide. Her blonde hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail; it shouldn’t be, probably. It would look better down.

“With?” Rachel says.

“Gillian says,” Amanda says, and then flushes. “Gillian says she knows how to kiss because you and she practiced. You’re the only girl I know who actually – you know – with a boy! Will you help me practice?”

Rachel’s heart wakes up.

“You want me to kiss you,” she says slowly. Amanda bites her lip, nods frantically.

“Only it doesn’t really count,” she says. “Because you’re a girl, and we’re not – you know – lesbians.” The last word she whispers. Then she stops. “Oh. You’re not – are you?”

“Of course not,” Rachel says. “But I’ll help you, if you’d like.” She pulls Amanda off to a section of stone wall, pulls herself up, watches Amanda follow. She puts her hand on Amanda’s face and tilts Amanda’s chin towards her own.

“Like this,” she says, and kisses her.

* * *

After the third girl comes blushing to Rachel and asking for help, Rachel starts to realize what she likes. She likes it when they’re soft; when they sigh breathily into her mouth, when they lean in towards her like a magnet pulling. She likes the little squeal when she nips at their lower lips. She likes the shape of them under their school uniforms, brushing a hand against a hip covered in pleated skirt, stroking the plane of a covered-up arm to feel its owner shiver. She likes threading her fingers through their hair. It’s sad, really: boys won’t take care of them like this, boys won’t look after them. She’s setting them all up to fail. It doesn’t really feel like anything. 

Not the kissing – that feels good. But Rachel should think of them as people, probably. People she might be hurting, people she is giving unrealistic expectations.

But it really doesn’t matter. At the end of the year Rachel will go back to DYAD, and they’ll remove her cleanly and clearly from the school’s records. She will never see these girls again. They will be nothing and dust.

For now they’re mouths and necks and the soft budding shapes of breasts and shy giggling and places to bite.  _You’re not a lesbian_ , they say.  _I’m not a lesbian. We’re not lesbians_.

 _Of course not,_ Rachel says, every time. She tries not think about it. She doesn’t like to think about what will happen if she does.

It’s not that she doesn’t kiss boys. She does kiss boys. There are boys at dances, and Rachel pins them up against the walls and closes her eyes and kisses them. With her eyes closed she can think of Sylvia, or Gillian – not kissing them, but the way they’d watch her kiss the boys.  _Like this_ , Rachel would say, careful and caring. She’d kiss boys for them, patiently, until they understood it. They’d thank her.

She likes boys more when she imagines girls watching. Gillian’s lip sucked between her teeth. Amanda’s eyes wide. With an army of phantoms around her, Rachel lets a boy fumble his hand up her skirt. She’s wet.

* * *

After a while, the kissing lessons stop.

* * *

Rachel has a boyfriend, for a month or so. Everyone does – they’re in fashion, like black knee socks or drinking from disgusting shared bottles of vodka. The name of Rachel’s boyfriend is Rupert. He puts his hands in all the wrong places when they kiss, but he lets her wear his jacket and doesn’t ever call her sugar or honey or baby. So she tolerates him.

They have sex. It’s fine. He watches her with wide and panicked eyes the entire time, and then his eyes roll back in his head and he goes oh – oh – OH – and then it’s over. Rachel slides off of him and adjusts her skirt. She’s still a little warm, but that’s mostly from thinking about–

Rupert kisses her. Fine. It feels like holding his hand, which is to say like nothing much. Rachel slips through the hallways of her brain and then outside, into the green grass and the tall whispering trees. Amanda is waiting for her on the wall. She’s nervous, but that’s alright. Rachel can help her. Rachel sits down next to her and kisses her the way that the boys never will; Amanda whimpers and shudders and sighs, and Rupert tries again to stick his tongue in Rachel’s mouth.

Rachel pulls Amanda’s hair out of her ponytail.  _It’s better like this_ , she says.  _It’s better like this, it’s better like this, it’s better like this_.

* * *

The girls all hug Rachel goodbye, when she leaves. They smell like shampoo and flowers and the first shy attempts at perfume. In the back of their eyes Rachel can see the secrets they are keeping with her: the empty classroom, the dormitory bed, the wall under the trees. She smiles at them, and with her smile she says  _I won’t tell_. And then they smile back at her.

Rachel takes her one suitcase out of the building, towards the black car that is waiting for her. Along the way she dumps the cards and flowers and handmade gifts into the garbage. A blank-faced man takes her suitcase and puts it in the trunk, and Rachel lets herself into the backseat. Doctor Leekie isn’t there. She wasn’t expecting him. The car pulls away, and Rachel looks back at the building – presses her hand to her chest, to feel the way her heart is still nervously fluttering back towards the school and the building and the girls. They had all hugged her goodbye. Their arms had been warm. Rachel had known the sound of them, the secret quiet sounds they won’t share with anyone else.

When Rachel looks in the rearview mirror, she sees the driver’s eyes already on her. When he looks away she lowers her hands and folds her hands in her lap. They drive on in silence. Rachel picks at her cuticles and tries to think about what they’ll have her work on – maybe the Leda subjects’ virginity, charting that. Maybe their grades. There’s a lot to study, and there’s even more to learn. Rachel can’t afford to – she can’t afford – she just. She can’t.

She doesn’t turn behind her to watch the school building vanish into dust. She just knows that they drive far enough, and then it’s gone.


	5. Lila

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [warning for dubious consent]

Each time the bathroom door opens, a gust of laughter and red wine carries in from the restaurant outside. It has opened three times since Rachel stumbled in here, tried to hold onto the counter, failed to hold onto the counter, and slipped down onto the bathroom floor. Three times. This pattern: a gust of laughter, the smell of red,  _are you okay?!_ ,  _I’m fine,_ the blank look of hurt in response to the tone of Rachel’s voice, the muttered  _okay_ , the retreat. Three goddamn times.

Rachel is fine, really; this has happened before, and she’s always stood back up again. She’ll be able to stand back up again. She’ll stand up again, and she’ll go outside, and she’ll sit back across the table from the stockbroker who’s paying for her dinner. The licking of his eyes over the dip of her black dress will remind her that she’s wanted, and that will straighten up her spine again. An hour or so for dinner, two hours after that for coffee – “coffee” – and then she’ll go home and take painkillers. Three hours is manageable.

She wishes her body would stop shaking, but it hasn’t listened to her before and she doubts it will decide to start now.

The bathroom door opens. A gust of laughter and red wine. The clicking of heels. “Oh my god, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you, like…” the girl with the cloud of black hair mimes taking a drag from a cigarette, even though Rachel is very obviously not holding a cigarette. Her wide and heavily-mascaraed blue eyes blink like a baby doll’s. Her legs wobble in her six-inch stilettos. She looks like a terrified child, or maybe a colt. Her dress is four inches too short. Red is absolutely not her color.

Rachel stares at her long enough to take all of this in, and then the girl sits down on the floor next to her. “Are you just taking a break?” she says into Rachel’s pointed silence. “Like, I get it. Is it a date? Does he suck? Do you need, like, help?”

She flicks her hair over one shoulder: the smell of apple blossoms and sweet white wine. She must be on her way to drunk. When the smell reaches Rachel, her heart pings.  _Not now_ , Rachel tells it; it does not listen to her.

“He’s fine,” she says. Her voice when it escapes her is rusty but – thankfully – functional. “Thank you for your concern.”

“Sweetie,” says the stranger, “no offense? If he was fine, you wouldn’t be sitting on the floor. Because this floor is gross.” She rummages in her little black clutch and pulls out a compact and a tube of lip gloss. Runs it around her lips and considers. “Also hi? I’m Lila. I’m like a  _little_  drunk.”

“Are you?”

“You’re  _so_  sweet,” Lila says, and touches her fingertips to the exposed skin of Rachel’s shoulder. “Like seriously the sweetest. Are you…high? Do you need a buddy?”

Rachel needs—

—but she doesn’t, really. She splays her fingers out in front of her and watches her hand twitch in juddering starts. She clenches it into a fist. When she opens it, all of her fingers are still.

“Hello?” Lila says.

“Please leave me alone,” Rachel says. She puts two palms down on the bathroom floor (Lila was right, it’s disgusting) and tries to push herself up to standing with sheer force of will. Her arms buckle; her legs are deadweight, and her high-heeled shoes are death traps. She folds back into a pile of broken pieces on the ground.

“ _No_ ,” Lila says, “no, oh my god, here, let me help you.” She flutters around anxiously on the ground, drops her clutch, and stands – easily – easily – easily – easily, she stands. Her hands shake through the air, fingers splayed, pity written in each and every bone. She reaches down for Rachel.

“I asked you to leave me alone,” Rachel says, voice rough. If the door opens again – if someone comes in here – and fury rises into her bones like thick black tar, numbing the constant unceasing goddamn ache of them. The way they have not even once stopped hurting since the last DYAD prescription gave up its very last pill. Not once. No matter the sex or the wine or the over-the-counter painkillers swallowed by the handful, no matter the stretches or the yoga or the attempts at gyrotonics, she does not stop hurting and she does not stop falling and the wreckage of her body will never,  _ever_  leave her alone–

–and Lila offering her hand–

–and Rachel feels more than hears the guttural animal sound she makes in the back of her throat. She closes her eyes. She takes Lila’s hand, and lets Lila make her pathetic attempts at helping Rachel stand.

Somehow, it works. Rachel doesn’t know how. She isn’t there for it. Her eyes are closed, and she lives in the place where the nauseous sea of color behind her right eyelid bleeds into blessedly empty black.

She opens her eyes again. She is standing. They are both standing. Lila is four inches taller than Rachel, even though Rachel is wearing three-inch heels. Rachel hates her for it.

“Okay,” Lila says. “There. Okay. Are you okay? Do you need water? Do you need a doctor? Do you need me to–”

“Yes,” Rachel says, and reaches forwards her pathetic trembling hands and grabs Lila’s hips and pulls her forward and smashes her mouth against Lila’s and tastes white wine and strawberry lip gloss and her brain is a shattered-glass howl,  _how could you let yourself do this, this is not right, this is wrong, stop, stop, stop_. The ball-and-socket joints of Rachel’s hips ache. Lila is kissing her back with the naive enthusiasm of a heterosexual woman who has done this sort of thing before at parties. Rachel hates her. Rachel finds the bottom of her dress and digs her fingers in, listens to Lila’s exaggerated whine. Fury builds and builds in Rachel until it is a white-hot nothing.

Bliss.

She lets Lila go and Lila stumbles backwards, eyes wide as a puppy dog’s. Her lashes are clumped together from her overeager use of mascara. Her lip gloss is smeared.

“Thank you,” Rachel says, each syllable crisp and devoid of feeling. She shoves herself off of the counter and – miraculously – manages to start walking, and keep walking. Because of this she is able to walk out of the bathroom (laughter) (red wine) and into the restaurant. She winds through the tables. The stockbroker is looking at something on his phone; when Rachel enters his periphery, he looks up at her. His eyes drag up from her cleavage to her face. 

“Hey,  _there_  you are,” he says. “Lady problems?”

Rachel digs her fingers into the back of her chair, so tight she can feel the fabric starting to rip. She opens her mouth to say it, to say it, to finally say it, to say “I’m–”

—and it stops, she can’t manage it. The letter  _g_  perches in her mouth like a fat flightless bird. The fear of being unable to speak reaches up and throttles Rachel’s throat again; the panic comes right behind it, and the fury, and the gorgeous and lingering taste of Lila’s artificial lip gloss.

But that doesn’t mean she can say it.

So instead she shoves out a breath through her nose, takes her coat off the back of the chair, and leaves the restaurant. The stockbroker calls her name after her, and the  _ay_  sound of the vowel, the way he says that sound, like it’s easy. Like it’s nothing. The taste of lip gloss and white wine in a bathroom that smells like bleach. What does he know about easy.

Outside of the restaurant the air is cold. Rachel fumbles her way into her coat with her stupid unbearable rusted limbs. She keeps walking, faster now, away from the restaurant, away from all of it. If she closed her eyes she could be back in the bathroom with Lila – the door locked, Lila panting and eager, Rachel’s whole body moving with the ease of a machine that has never dreamed of being broken.

Instead: this. She crosses the street. She has no idea where she’s going. All she knows is that her legs are starting to hurt, already, and also she can’t do this for much longer at all.

So Rachel flags down a taxi. In the backseat, she opens up a dating application. She opens her profile. She lets her hand hover over a radio button for a long time, and then – finally – she lets herself touch it.


End file.
